Trying to assess something as recent and dynamic as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) presents problems for political analysts. There is always a danger that by the time one has written in judgement the event-movement will have morphed into something quite different. For this reason alone we need to be careful about offering too definitive a judgment on what it represents, about what we think is new in the phenomenon as well as what we think presents linkages to the past. On the one hand, OWS is still in the process of becoming-something . On the other hand, though, we can see the outline of more or less familiar characteristics that might help orientate us towards something that is being greeted as a new departure

Simon Tormey

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Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, Issue 5 (2012)    132  Occupy Wall Street: From Representation to Post-Representation  Simon Tormey  Trying  to  assess  something  as  recent  and  dynamic  as  Occupy  Wall  Street  (OWS) presents problems for political analysts.  There is always a danger that by the time one has written  in  judgement  the  event-movement  will  have  morphed  into  something  quite different.  For this reason alone we need to be careful about offering too definitive a judgment on what it represents, about what we think is new in the phenomenon as well as what we think presents linkages to the past. On the one hand, OWS is still in the process of becoming-something. On the other hand, though, we can see the outline of more or less familiar characteristics that might help orientate us towards something that is being greeted as a new departure. OWS is, it seems, a ‘non-affiliated’, non-programmatic, ‘disorganised’ set of protests, interconnected virtually through a variety of social media, drawing attention to gross inequalities of wealth and power (‘we are the 99%’).  The first half of the description should give us the clues we need to trace the lineage and ancestry of the initiative. In particular it tells us what OWS is not, namely a political  party  or  a  single  issue  social  movement  with  a  neat  hierarchy  and  formal structure, or a published manifesto outlining clear aims and objectives that will address inequities and injustices.  It’s an odd stance at first glance – to define oneself by what one isn’t, as opposed to what one is.  How do we make sense of the gesture? Firstly,  history  is  littered  with  disaffiliated,  non-programmatic  groups  who wanted to contest inequality in quite general terms.  Groups such as the Ranters and Levellers, which sprang up during the English Civil War in 1600s, display many such characteristics.    Some  of  them  such  as  Gerrard  Winstanley’s  True  Levellers  even occupied space in  ways that resonate with OWS  – that is, through occupation  as a political ‘act’ whose intention was to draw attention to inequalities of wealth and income (Hill 1975, pp.132-9). Many of the early resistances to the enclosure of the commons, to clearance of land for ‘improvement’, and to capitalism more broadly, had this quality to them, and not just in Britain.  However, with the emergence of ‘organised’ politics over the course of the nineteenth century – in the form of political parties, elections, the ‘free press’ and the rest of the paraphernalia of liberal-democracy – direct action as a style of politics receded (even if it didn’t disappear entirely).     Representation thus became paradigmatic of ‘the political’, even when that From Representation to Post-Representation, Tormey   133politics  was  oppositional  or  counter-hegemonic.    Political  parties  came  to  represent classes, needs, interests.  Governments represented nations, the People. Representation thus consecrated what Hardt and Negri  (2004, p. 241) term a ‘disjunctive synthesis’: the creation of aggregate entities through a process of separation – a separation of elites from masses, of governors from the governed, of those with power from those without power. Politics became bureaucratised, normal, serious, rational. For mainstream politics, this meant putting clear water between the wayward emotions of the mob and the wisdom of the political class. For counter-hegemonic politics, the party guaranteed that those with the ‘correct’ analysis of the ‘line of march’ would keep the ‘trade union’ or reformist instincts  of  the  masses  in  check.  Politics  thus  became  the  preserve  of  the  few,  the oligarchs. Organised politics of this kind dominated the period of social democracy, the birth of the welfare state, and of ‘cradle to grave’ entitlements.  Political docility mirrored domestic docility, all built on a cosy compact between citizen and state (‘you let us govern and we’ll guarantee jobs and prosperity’). Yet just as economic wealth underpinned the consolidation of organised politics, so too did economic uncertainty, unrest and crisis fuel more grassroots and disorganised forms of politics.  1968, the year of disorganised revolts and insurrections, is an important way marker for change in the nature of the political.  It marked the first step in the decline of the representational paradigm, and the re-emergence  of non- or ‘post-representative’ political repertoires: direct action, squatting, affinity groups, protests, carnivals. Many of these  initiatives  are  sparked  by  a  self-conscious  rejection  of  ‘normal’  or  mainstream political processes. They turn their face on parties, elections, and manifestos in favour of the immediacy of action, of doing, in the here and now – not saving our energies for some scripted ‘crisis of capitalism’.   The 1970s and 1980s were periods when much of this kind of activity was subsumed  within  what  became  known  as  ‘new  social  movements’,  which  included movements against war, the nuclear bomb, environmental degradation, race and identity discrimination.  They were immediate, direct, and ‘dis’-organised in the sense of not being tied to a permanent bureaucracy or set of offices.  Often leaderless, acephelous, sometimes  spontaneous,  unruly  and  difficult  to  predict.    In  A  Thousand  Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 22) famously coined the term ‘rhizomatic’ to describe ‘subterranean’ underground initiatives of this kind. The rhizome makes us distinguish between the liminal and the subliminal, between what ‘expert’ commentary sees above, and  what  lurks  beneath  the  surface.    Even  when  ‘nothing  seems  to  be  happening’, rhizome-networks  can  be  growing,  developing,  readying  themselves  for  the  next opportunity to push through the surface and emerge in unpredictable ways.  Such has become  the  pattern  of  post-representative,  disorganised  politics  over  the  past  four decades. Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, Issue 5 (2012)    134 So in the current conjuncture the representative paradigm reigns, just about. And  we  still  have  periods  where  nothing  seems  to  be  happening  outside  of  the mainstream political process, voting, elections and politicians.  It is at this point when it becomes easy for commentary to lament the ‘apathy’ and ‘boredom’ of the young, our disengagement from the political process, reluctance to participate etc.  Then, ‘suddenly’, there will be an eruption from below, from the subterranean stratum, that reminds us that politics is not just about politicians.  Sometimes this kind of politics has an immediate and radical impact. The fall of communism in Eastern Europe looked much like this. The ‘Arab Spring’ has a similar epoch-making aspect to it. Sometimes such politics is easy to write off as ‘ineffectual’ or ‘gestural’ as in the Seattle Protests, the protests against the G8, Reclaim  the  Streets,  the  World  Social  Forum,  the  Clandestine  Insurrectionary Revolutionary  Clown  Army  (CIRCA).  Sometimes  we  can  wait  for  months  or  years before knowing what kind of resonance or longer-term impact an initiative will have. How much impact has the Zapatista insurrection had, or the Narmada Dam protests, or the uprising in Nandigram, or the rise of the Indignados?  Difficult to tell.   OWS is part of this story.  It offers further evidence that the paradigm of representative politics, the politics of political parties, elections and voting is on the wane.  Participants in OWS proclaim that they not programmatic, that it has no answers, even that it is not ‘politically affiliated’.  It contrasts itself with the style and manner of forms of representation  that  by  contrast  proclaim  an  analysis,  an  ideology,  a  programme,  an organisation representing distinct interests, viewpoints and actors.  OWS challenges this paradigm, directly.  It tells us that no form of representative politics, no political party, can change the basic coordinates of the liberal-democratic capitalist system. In this horizon only a ‘disorganised’ repertoire of direct and immediate political actions enables people to be ‘heard’ as opposed to being subsumed within the machinic  meta-mobilism of ‘normal’ politics. ‘Not in my Name’ is an emblematic expression of this winding back of the representative paradigm. It says that I will not be annexed for a larger purpose.  I must myself speak to and embody the changes we need in order to address inequality.  This however is the easy part, for a paradoxical feature of post-representative politics  is  that  it  does  not,  as  the  post-  prefix  reminds  us,  escape  the  pragmatics  of representation; it brings it into question.  ‘We are the 99%’ is after all a quintessential representative claim (‘We are you’, a slogan borrowed from the Zapatistas, is another equally direct example).  Here we see also a potential immobilising quality of OWS, one that infects all post-representative initiatives.  If it cannot but represent, then how to do this without becoming itself a symptom of the politics it so sets its face against – i.e. representative politics (Saward 2010)? How does OWS escape the trap of opposing representative modes of political  engagement in  a non-representative way?  How to escape  the  apparently  futile  and  self-denying  gesture  of  ‘post-representative’ representation? Not  an  easy  question,  which  is  why,  as  many  commentators  have  argued, From Representation to Post-Representation, Tormey   135immobilism and inefficacy seem at one level built into OWS; this point has even been raised by those who are sympathetic to the movement. Think of Slavoj Žižek’s appeal to OWS to repeat Lenin’s question: ‘What is to be Done?’ (Žižek 2011). However, this is to look at OWS through the lens of those whose logic is itself queried by the OWS initiative – those who see politics as a ‘sovereign’ activity in which power is deployed to achieve ends in a narrow, instrumental and exclusionary way. How to escape the cul-de-sac?  Several possibilities present themselves to those who valorise OWS and wish to see it develop as a style and form of politics:  1.  Accept  the  very  event-ness  of  the  event-movement.    As  McKenzie  Wark  (2011) reminds us, the Situationists urged us to think of politics not in linear terms, but in terms of intensities for the participants as well as for the bystander. Those who take part in the event  of  OWS  will  never  be  the  same  again:  they  are  changed,  angered,  energised, despondent, angry, alienated, joyous.  Those who encounter OWS may display complete indifference, or they may be affected.  Somehow. Something might resonate.  They may ask themselves a David Byrne type question: ‘How did I get here?’ Mini-micro political gestures.  But sometimes large-scale change comes from micro-gestures – the first step on a long journey, to paraphrase Gandhi.   2.  Accept the positioning of OWS as one amongst a series of resonances and gestures that collectively add up to something more than a gesture-less politics.  As my comments above indicate, OWS is one kind of resistance that ‘represents’ in its post-representativity the response of those at the margin of wealthy countries of the metropolitan centre; the Zapatista insurrection (to take a contrasting example) is another kind of resistance, one characteristic of the needs and resources of groups at the global periphery.  They are both concerned with the same issue: the monopolisation of power and wealth in the hands of the few.  They are both pertinent to the contexts and capacities of people on the ground in a particular time and space.  They resonate in different ways, they have different effects, but their concerns are very similar.   3. Accept that OWS is a stance of what Hardt and Negri would no doubt label ‘refusal’, as opposed to affirmation. This is not to say that it cannot prefigure or point at alternative forms of organisation, and being-together. It self-consciously positions itself as a puzzle, as a ‘no’ without a ‘yes’.  Lest it be forgotten, refusal can be just as potent a means of change as affirmation.  Gandhi saw this, Havel saw it, and so have the millions of campaigners who have collectively refused colonial, racist or exclusionary policies and practices, and who have therefore become agents delegitimating them.  It might strike us as odd to see ‘weapons of the weak’ (to mobilise James Scott) being exerted under mature democratic conditions (Scott, 1985). We are perhaps unused to the idea of the vote-wielding citizen Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, Issue 5 (2012)    136 as ‘weak’, as ‘dispossessed’, and as having to call upon similar tactics to those at the global periphery who live in non- or sub-democratic conditions.    But then here is the larger issue. Liberal-democracy is being hollowed out by the growth of often-unaccountable global institutions and processes, such as the IMF, the World Bank and most recently the bond markets. In this sense, OWS is not just a gesture in opposition to representation.  It is a gesture marking the slow yet seemingly inexorable collapse of representative democratic governance as a practice and as the paradigmatic ‘end  of  history’.    Representative  governance  is,  on  the  contrary,  increasingly  seen  as complicit in the emptying out of democracy, and in the perpetuation of gross inequalities.  OWS  is  part  of  the  generalised  revolt  against  representation.    It  asks  to  re-imagine democracy as an instrument of the 99% as opposed to something that operates as the handmaiden of global capitalism, and the 1%.   As my comments above indicate, such a gesture should not be seen as in itself novel or radically different to the demands of myriad individuals and groups throughout modernity.  What is perhaps novel is the globality, the speed, and resonant effects of such a gesture. It is now evident that it is not just global financial transactions that travel at the speed  of  light,  but  the  righteous  indignation  of  the  many  millions  subject  to  the capricious, over-arching power of the plutocrats and those lined up to represent them and their interests.      References References References References     Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum. Hardt, M. and Negri, A., 2004. Multitude. New York: Penguin. Hill, C., 1975. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Saward, M., 2010. The Representative Claim. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Scott, J., 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press.  Wark, M., 2011. This Shit is Fucked up and Bullshit. Theory & Event [Online], 14(4). Available at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v014/14.4S.wark.html> Accessed on 12 December 2011. Žižek, S., 2011. Occupy First, Demands Come Later. The Guardian [Online], 26 October. Available at <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/occupy-protesters-bill-clinton> Accessed on 12 December 2011.  From Representation to Post-Representation, Tormey   137    Simon Tormey Simon Tormey Simon Tormey Simon Tormey is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Sydney.  He is the author of numerous books and articles, including most recently, Agnes Heller: Socialism, Autonomy and the Postmodern (Manchester University Press, 2001), Anti-Capitalism (Oneworld, 2004) and Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to Post-Marxism (Sage, 2006, with Jules Townshend).  He is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled Not in My Name: The Crisis of Representation and What it Means for Democracy.   

Occupy Wall Street: From Representation to Post-Representation

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